Friday, September 19, 2014

YES, BUT NOW YOU'RE ABOUT TO SEE A STEREOTYPICALLY ANGRY JEWISH GUY: Vulture (Margaret Lyons)Jezebel (Kara Brown), Slate (Willa Paskin), and Vox (Alex Abad-Santos) are among those deservedly flaying the NYT's Alessandra Stanley over a truly "inaccurate, tone-deaf, muddled, and racist" (Lyons) profile of our good friend, Shonda Rhimes.

AT LEAST THEY'RE NOT MAKING KENDRICK DYE HER HAIR BLONDE: To more smoothly incorporate Into The Woods into Disney canon, they're changing a few character names--rather than just "Rapunzel's Prince" and "Cinderella's Prince,"the characters will be "Flynn Rider" and "Prince Charming" (though (a) Flynn wasn't a prince, and (b) if you're going that way, why not just go ahead and cast Zachary Levi?), and "Cinderella's Stepmother" is officially "Lady Tremaine."

HEY HEY HEY: Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the debut of The Cosby Show. There's much to discuss, including the sweaters, whether we'll ever have another sitcom with the lead expressly billed above the title (all eight seasons opened with "Bill Cosby in The Cosby Show"), and which of the eight show openers was the best and the worst. (The "interpretive dance in beach attire" of Season 5 is unquestionably the weirdest.)

Since people haven't been eating nearly as much of it as they used to, the latest Grape Nuts ad campaign, running now on MSN's Web site, is trying a new tonic: It consists of skits in which male milquetoasts get droll advice on "looking cool while driving a minivan," or "letting your in-laws move into your house." The slogan -- "That takes Grape Nuts" -- implies that the stuff enhances virility. C.W Post might have written it himself...

"We need to bring it back to life in a relevant way," says Kelley Peters, the "insights" director who charts Grape Nuts psychographics for Ralcorp's $5 million resuscitation attempt. Her target: men 45 years old and up. "Men aspire to it," she says. "It's strong and stern, the father figure of cereals." Her marketing chief, Jennifer Marchant, points out: "It tends to break your teeth sometimes."

Thursday, September 18, 2014

I HEAR THERE'S A MEAT AND CHEESE SANDWICH I OUGHT TO TRY: So, I have about 24 hours in the City of Brotherly Love next week (Wednesday late afternoon-Thursday late afternoon) before I head to a wedding down the Shore. I'm staying in the historic district (right near the Constitution Center), and will have a car. What do I need to eat, see, and do, folks?

It was instructive how many hits the 20-song set omitted: yes, "Learning to Fly" and its obverse "Free Fallin'," but no room for "I Need to Know" or "The Waiting," "Breakdown," or "You Got Lucky." Philadelphia heard precisely 12 of the hits in the 20-song set list, which perhaps isn't really enough.

And ragtime! Shameless music that will grab your son, your daughter in the arms of a jungle animal instinct

Well, it wouldn't be a classic cultural panic without a little appeal to racism about a genre of music that originated in black communities and how it's going to bring out the out-of-control, sex-having jungle animal in your nice little kids (including daughters, mentioned here for the first and only time during a rant that's been mostly about boys).

Monday, September 15, 2014

WHILE DECLINING TO DEFEND "FRIED LASAGNA": Oh, the war's not over. Darden's defending Olive Garden's breadsticks, and more, in a 24-slide deck.

Olive Garden’s salad and breadsticks have been an icon of brand equity since 1982. It conveys Italian generosity and our salads have the highest loyalty rating of any menu item based on the menu satisfaction surveys we conduct.

I KNOW YOU WANT THIS: Remember that copyright litigation between Marvin Gaye and the folks behind Blurred Lines? Well, Pharrell and Robin Thicke's depositions have now been made public, and let's just say that they perhaps didn't go so well. Apparently, Pharrell wrote the whole song, Thicke was stoned out of his mind, and Pharrell explains that he respects Marvin Gaye because he's an Aries.

He told an anecdote about the day he spied Williams in a restaurant. He strolled up to her table and said, “I’ve had a crush on you since third grade.” She thanked him, and then asked, “Why did you make Isabella Rossellini show her beaver?”

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